Arts & Entertainment

And Now…Here Comes A.I. Derangement Syndrome!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Coca-Cola’s AI ad just ruined Christmas… again” rages tech blog CB (Creative Bloq) Wow. A Coca-Cola by-the-numbers holiday ad lasting a bit more than 60 seconds ruined Christmas just like the Grinch or Mr. Potter. How is that possible?

It isn’t, but apparently the new tool of artificial intelligence which can create things like the Coke ad faster and cheaper than CGI has some folks losing their jingle bells. What’s going on here?

This: the Marxists and progressives on social media and elsewhere are upset because AI puts actors out of work, or soon will. Of course, except for Santa, there are no humans in the ad to be put out of work, but the critics on X and elsewhere aren’t fooled. Coke used cute animals, see, so people would be fooled into thinking that AI wasn’t taking away human jobs. “Firstly, can you really put aside the issues of AI generated creative displacing artists simply by using animals instead of humans?,” Fergus McCallum, CEO at TBWA\MCR wonders. “Even if you can, there’s no getting away from the lack of joy and authenticity. As audiences start to turn away from the AI slop being served to them on a daily basis, Coca-Cola are in danger of becoming inauthentic too. Whatever happened to ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’?!”

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Write Your Own Ethics Movie Treatment In Today’s Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The condign justice article in the New York Times right now is the news about how badly comedies and drama are doing at the movie box office. Good. Hollywood deserves it, and has for a while. The gift link is here, but the article is biased and incompetent. When the Times gets around to theorizing about why this is happening, guess what it omits?

The Wuhan Virus freakout and lockdown, which Hollywood’s wildly woke pals in the news media, the medical profession, the teachers’ unions and in government agencies inflicted on the nation and the culture. Ending the important social binding function of shared audience experiences is just one of the collateral catastrophes the mass, partially politically-motivated fearmongering created.

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“Right To Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution” and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

So much of the nation’s cultural health and societal values rely on our fulfillment of the duty to remember. Thanks to our incompetent and unethical education system and the increasing estrangement of American history from our popular culture, recent generations share so little important historical and cultural touchpoints as Americans that effective cross-generational communication is becoming impossible. Television could be a nostrum for this dangerous phenomenon, if only finding the constructive and informative programming were not a task akin to finding, as the saying goes, a needle in needle stack.

I was thinking about this after I stumbled upon the 2022 Starz documentary, “Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution,” a two-part series that I only saw because I am briefly getting Starz free on DirecTV. I missed it entirely when it was new, and have never read or heard anything about it. I haven’t seen the whole series yet either, and only watched an incomplete stretch of Episode One. But that was enough to trigger several thoughts, and to make me schedule a serious viewing of the whole thing from beginning to end.

Among those revelations,

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A Law Student Production of “Hamlet”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Georgetown Gilbert and Sullivan Society is the now half-century old theater organization I inadvertently spawned as a first year law student (before they were called “1Ls”) at Georgetown University Law Center. Right now, the group, which calls itself “The only theater group with its own law school,” is nearing an all-time peak in student participation, interest and talent, making this old lawyer-theater guy proud and happy indeed.

Last night I attended closing night of the group’s ambitious, full production of “Hamlet,” which most community theater groups wouldn’t dare attempt. It was a modern dress version (period set “Hamlet’s” are the exception rather than the rule and have been for decades) with an “emo” concept that worked just fine. The student director staged with skill and intelligence, the casting was spot on, and it even gave me some new insights into the work despite having see the play too many times to list. Yes, a woman played the Danish prince, but the 1L actress was excellent, and female Hamlets first appeared in 1899, when the great Sarah Bernhardt played the role.

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Announcement: “Fuck” Has Been Officially Upgraded From Taboo Obscenity to Mainstream Colloquialism

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

This battle was lost long ago.

“Wheel of Fortune” has launched a new “What the Fun?” category because it implies “fuck.” The One Million Moms group is disgusted and outraged. “The once family-friendly ‘Wheel of Fortune’ game show is no more,” its site declared on October 30. “Unfortunately, the recently added puzzle category ‘What the Fun’ aims at a mature, modern audience with insinuated profanity making it no longer suitable for family viewing.”

“It is not the show it was with this implication of the f-word,” it continued. “Parents will have to explain to their children that the primetime program they were once allowed to watch is no longer a clean show.” The page included a link for a petition on which to pledge never to watch the show again unless the category is eliminated. More than 12,500 have signed.

Imagine a life so devoid of meaning and so full of discretionary time that one can organize a campaign to change a “Wheel of Fortune” category.

I have news for the conservative group, and by now it is old news. “Fuck” is now just acceptable naughtiness, and not the taboo obscenity it once was. Ditto “shit.” There are lots of reason why this has happened, and things like “What the Fun” are a big one.

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Victor Fleming Was a Genius

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

And attention should be paid.

Victor Fleming is never included in the list of immortal Hollywood film directors. I never understood why, and now I really don’t understand why. Everybody knows, or should, that Fleming pulled off the all-time film directing achievement of helming two deathless classics in two distinct genres in the same year, 1939. The films: “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.” The closest to that amazing performance anyone else ever came was in 1993, when Stephen Spielberg delivered both “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park.” But Spielberg is automatically in the discussion when great film directors are the topic, and Fleming is not.

I could make the argument that Fleming belongs in that discussion based on his output alone. Though he died at the age of 59 and had only 20 years to create movies in the sound era, Fleming had several other classic films that still hold up: “The Virginian,” “Captains Courageous,” “Treasure Island,” Dr. “Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “A Guy Named Joe” and “Joan of Arc” in addition to his two 1939 icons. But that isn’t the reason for this post.

Victor Fleming was ahead of his time, way, ahead, in two respects that only noticed recently:

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End of the Baseball Season Ethics Recap, 11/2/25, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

If you missed last night’s Game 7 of the epic World Series just completed, you have my sympathy; if you missed it, or the entire Series really, because baseball isn’t part of your life you have my pity. Let me quote here the late, great Roger Angell, baseball’s Bard, writing about the only better World Series I’ve ever watched, the 1975 edition where the Cincinnati Reds beat (barely) the Boston Red Sox, also in seven games. He was effusing specifically about Carlton Fisk’s famous home run in the 12th inning (I was there!) in his New Yorker essay “Agincourt and After”:

“Carlton Fisk, leading off the bottom of the twelfth against Pat Darcy, the eighth Reds pitcher of the night—it was well into morning now, in fact—socked the second pitch up and out, farther and farther into the darkness above the lights, and when it came down at last, re-illuminated, it struck the topmost, innermost edge of the screen inside the yellow left-field foul pole and glanced sharply down and bounced on the grass: a fair ball, fair all the way. I was watching the ball, of course, so I missed what everyone on television saw—Fisk waving wildly, weaving and writhing and gyrating along the first-base line, as he wished the ball fair, forced it fair with his entire body. He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” fortissimo, and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them—in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all four Manchesters; and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway—jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on backcountry roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy—alight with it.

…What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

Caring is an ethical value.

I’ll get to the other ethics news in Part 2…

The Sec. of Transportation Tells Kim Kardashian That She’s an Irresponsible Ignorance-Spreading Fool. Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In an episode of the reality show “The Kardashians” (My god, is that still on?) Uber Kardashian Kim, the only one of the breed who earned her celebrity (with a sex tape and a huge derriere), told actress Sarah Paulson that she had watched interviews with Buzz Aldrin, who was on the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong and the second person to walk on the moon, and they convinced her that the moon landing was a government hoax.

“I don’t think we did. I think it was fake,” the Kimster announced. “I’ve seen a few videos on Buzz Aldrin talking about how it didn’t happen. He says it all the time now, in interviews.” Does anyone know what the hell she’s babbling about? The last time I heard about Aldrin in relation to the moonwalk conspiracy theory, he punched a guy in the face for claiming it was true.

Then Kardashian repeated a trope of the ancient conspiracy theory: “There’s no gravity on the moon. Why is the flag blowing?” I view that statement all by itself as signature significance: anyone who says it once is too gullible to be let outside without a keeper, and anyone who says it publicly is an idiot. The “mystery” can be answered by viewing the archived videos or by 3 seconds of googling. Who goes on TV and asserts a non-fact that anyone, including her, can prove false in a trice?

This time, however, big guns were trained on the specific idiot. Sean Duffy, the US Transportation Secretary and acting administrator of NASA, rebutted the whatever-she-is on X. He wrote: “Yes, Kim Kardashian, we’ve been to the moon before … Six times! And even better, NASA Artemis is going back under the leadership of [President Trump]. We won the last space race and we will win this one too.”

Madison, Wis, bloggress Ann Althouse, in one of her “it’s not the topic, it’s the tangents” posts, asks,

“Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory? We’re Americans. We have our conspiracy theories. Keep your government nose out of our business. You’re only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists. Why stick your neck out to deny what isn’t true? You’re making it more fun to believe the theory!”

Ann is evoking the “Streisand Effect” with her “You’re only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.” She’s wrong, maybe even at an Ethics Dunce level. This conspiracy is hardly unknown: there was even a movie about it, and I have encountered moonwalk skeptics periodically ever since the event. “Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory?” Because, Ann, celebrities are not “private citizens.” They are public citizens; they make their millions by being famous and by appearing, speaking and misbehaving in public. More Americans by far know who Kim Kardashian is than who know who Sean Duffy is. A disturbing number of Americans, maybe even a majority, believe that being a celebrity (and appearing on TV) indicates virtue, wisdom and intelligence. Celebrity culture helped get Donald Trump elected President. Doesn’t Ann Althouse understand that? Hasn’t she ever heard the rejoinder, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

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Friday Open Forum, Halloween Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 98 Comments

I have a two-hour Zoom ethics seminar to teach this morning as lawyers who have waited until the last minute to get their ethics CLE credits in will be counting on me to rescue them.

Please help me out by leaving some ethics treats here at the open forum.

Meanwhile, if you have access to Disney+ and haven’t seen the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” segment of the Master’s “Ichabod and Mr. Toad” since you were a tot (or ever), I recommend it highly. The first segment (an adaptation of “The Wind in the Willows”) is also excellent but not Halloween-themed.

Ethics Alarms Hybrid Day Part 2: Confronting My Biases #24 & Ethics Quiz of the Day: Prop Children

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Rachel Campos-Duffy is a regular sofa-sitter on Fox News’ IQ-killing morning show “Fox & Friends.” She is notable for one of the worst voices possessed by any talking head on TV, which is saying something: why someone at Fox hasn’t sent her to a vocal coach is a mystery, and the producers’ failure to make this happen is, I believe, irresponsible and incompetent. But I digress…

As noted in the previous post, October is National Down Syndrome Awareness Month. Campos-Duffy has a daughter, age six, with Down syndrome. She is her 9th child with former Congressman Sean Duffy, now Trump’s Transportation Secretary,who resigned from Congress in September 2019 after Valentina Stella Maris Duffy was born. (I wonder who takes care of all those kids, in a two career family?)

This morning Campos-Duffy brought her daughter onto the show as she spoke about Down Syndrome, its various ranges (Valentina is a high-functioning sufferer), and the challenges of raising these children. Her daughter was dressed up elaborately as “a flamingo dancer,” as the astute Fox hostess put it, and squirmed distractedly on the sofa next to her mother while paying no attention to her surroundings or what her mother was saying.

Campos-Duffy spoke about her child in such remote terms that I wasn’t sure that the little girl was her child. I half expected Valentina to blurt out, “I’m right here!” The spectacle reminded me of Jim Fowler’s visits to the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show,” when he would talk about a boa constrictor, stork or a pangolin while Johnny mugged and it crawled all over him.

At one point Valentina wondered away, off camera, while her mother was taking about her, and Rachel laughed uproariously. “See? She’s toilet trained!” Campos-Duffy said mysteriously as her two male colleagues also yucked it up at whatever the little girl was doing.

At one point, Mom asked Valentina a couple of questions, which the girl answered “yes” and “no.” Wow, she does tricks!

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